March – April 2014

SAN FRANCISCO PREMIERE! DIRECTOR LANCE BANGS & SLINT GUITARIST BRIAN MCMAHAN IN PERSON! Feature length documentary about the band Slint and the Louisville music culture they emerged from. Throughout the 1980s, a group of friends in Louisville, Kentucky grew up forming bands, breaking up, and reforming in different configurations. They were playing hardcore shows at ages 10-12, touring with Samhain as 14 year olds, recording for Homestead as Squirelbait at age 15, then formed Slint in their late teens and recorded the classic album Spiderland before they were 21. They broke up before the album’s release, giving no interviews and vanishing into their own shadows. Two decades passed as filmmaker Lance Bangs assembled unseen footage of the teenagers writing and arranging Spiderland as well as the first on camera interviews with the band members and their contemporaries trying to decipher what they had been through. Featuring Slint, Steve Albini, Ian Mackaye, David Grubbs, David Yow, James Murphy and archival material from Will Oldham. Dir: Lance Bangs. 2014. Digital. Thursday at 7:15pm & 9:45pm and Friday at 9:30pm.

SAN FRANCISCO PREMIERE! FILMMAKER IN PERSON! What does Jackass, Pavement, Earl Sweatshirt and Elliot Smith have in common? That would be Portland, Oregon-based Lance Bangs, a filmmaker who has a hand in everything cool from the last 25 years, basically. Since we already have him here with his totally awesome new documentary about Slint (BREADCRUMB TRAIL, screening 3/20), we’re taking this opportunity to take a peak inside his archives! Lance will be screening music videos, documentary excerpts, short films, concert footage, and experimental collaborations ranging from iconic bursts of pop culture to rarer unreleased pieces. Among the subjects: The Arcade Fire, Belle & Sebastian, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Cat Power, Earl Sweatshirt, Ghostface Killah, Guided By Voices, Kanye West, LCD Soundsystem, Menomena, Neutral Milk Hotel, Nirvana, No Age, R.E.M., RZA, The Shins, Sleater-Kinney, Elliott Smith, Sonic Youth, The White Stripes, and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. 7:30pm, Digital, 100 mins.

Join FILM CULT for a five-hour mission at the ROXIE THEATER to celebrate Canada’s finest, WILLIAM SHATNER, turning 83! Party with a Film Cult Triple BILL presented by your favorite interstellar hostess, KLINGON VANNA WHITE (Speakeasily, Vortesque)! Shat-Shorts before Features! Boldly get “SHAT-faced”!

THE HORROR AT 37,000 FEET
Will Shatner’s drunken, cynical ex-priest be able to save a celeb-filled passenger flight from Death-By-Satanic-Relic? Get onboard the Shatner Birthday Party Plane to find out! 16mm film projection! Starring William Shatner, Chuck Connors, Buddy Ebsen & Tammy Grimes. Dir: David Lowell Rich. 1973. 16mm. 7pm.

IMPULSE
Shatner boldly takes his acting to strange new dimensions as a paranoid and pimped out conman/gigolo/literal ladykiller in the mutherfuckinest of all Midnight Movies! In Shocking 35mm! Starring William Shatner, Ruth Roman, Jennifer Bishop & Harold Sakata. Dir: William Grefe. 1974. MIDNIGHT.

“CADET SPECIAL”: SINGLE FEATURE ADMISSION $9 “CAPTAIN’S PACKAGE”: SEE ALL 3 FULL-LENGTH FEATURES FOR $20

Representing the only free and public, performing- and visual-arts high school in San Francisco, the Media (Film/Video) Department at the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts has been dedicated, for over 20 years, to cultivating innovators and experimentors, cinematic visionaries who work across genres to create short narrative, documentary, animated, and experimental films.

Using a number of methods and techniques, articulating personally and socially relevant content utilizing the classroom, school, and the greater Bay Area as both location and inspiration, these diverse shorts will challenge your preconceptions of “the student film.” This program will showcase a variety of youth works from the past 10 years–written, directed, shot, and edited entirely by high-school students –and will raise money for the department’s upcoming class trip to New York City.

Presented by Docunight, in collaboration with National Iranian American Council

In 2004 filmmaker Taghi Amirani gained unprecedented access to Shargh, at the time Iran’s leading reformist newspaper. With full official permits from all the relevant Iranian authorities he went behind the scenes with the paper’s young journalists as they went about their job of reporting and commenting on a wide range of social, cultural and political stories. Amirani’s camera follows the journalists on assignments and at home as they offer rare insights not just about journalism but also about post revolutionary Iranian society. Made in the final year of President Khatami’s second term in office, RED LINES AND DEADLINES is a film made by an Iranian with Iranians that tries to stay clear of clichés about Iran presented in western media.

Director: Taghi Amirani. 2004/5.

About Docunight

Every last Tuesday of every month, Docunight will screen a documentary about, around, in, made by Iran or Iranians. The screenings will take place on the same night across several cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Vancouver, London, and Dubai (the list of locations is growing). Docunight films will be diverse in subject and will run the gamut. All films will have English subtitles.

In the middle of an uneventful summer on the outskirts of Brooklyn, Lila, a lonely fourteen-year-old from Gravesend, turns her attentions to Sammy, an older thug she sees at Rockaway beach. Wanting something to brag about, she weaves a story about him and becomes fixated on seeing it realized. When her attempts fail, she propels the lie even further, claiming they’ve had sex. During her sexual quest, Lila turns from predator to prey. IT FELT LIKE LOVE captures the confusing emotions and developing identity of an adolescent girl that explores what could euphemistically be called love. Starring Gina Piersanti. Directed by Eliza Hittman. 2013. Digital.

Hailed by Michael Moore as “one of the best documentaries about a band that I’ve ever seen” and by Pitchfork as “the funniest, most meta music movie since SPINAL TAP,” MISTAKEN FOR STRANGERS is a truly hilarious, unusual, and moving film about two brothers, Matt and Tom Berninger.

Matt, the lead singer of the critically acclaimed rock band The National, finally finds himself flush with success. His younger brother, Tom, is a loveable slacker – a filmmaker and metal-head still living with his parents in Cincinnati. On the eve of The National’s biggest tour to date, Matt invites Tom to work for the band as a roadie, unaware of Tom’s plan to film the entire adventure.

What starts as a rock documentary soon becomes a surprisingly honest portrait of a charged relationship between two brothers, and the frustration of unfulfilled creative ambitions. Directed by Tom Berninger. Digital. 2013.

“Searing… …an engrossing character study and a biting social statement that works on so many levels, it’s hard to separate them all.” – San Francisco Chronicle

Călin Peter Netzer’s sharply crafted CHILD’S POSE pivots on a riveting performance by Luminita Gheorghiu (Best Supporting Actress, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Los Angeles Film Critics) as a steely, well-to-do Bucharest architect determined to keep her 30-something deadbeat son out of jail after a deadly car crash. How far will she go to convince the police, eyewitnesses and even the victim’s family that her son was not recklessly speeding? A spellbinding drama of social commentary and psychological realism, this caustic look into the corrupt heart of the Eastern European bourgeoisie twists into a brilliantly ambiguous study of obsessive motherly love. The Official Romanian Entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 86th Academy Awards. Digital. 2013.

“Perversely engrossing thanks to Gheorghiu’s performance as the queen of denial.– Newsday

How did a casual party game designed for the family become one of the most watched fighters in the history of competitive gaming? From East Point Pictures, THE SMASH BROTHERS chronicles the saga of the small yet passionate community responsible for this transformation and provides a rare account of the real lives beyond the controller. The documentary series follows the top seven “smashers” of the last decade, and examines the shaping of the competitive Smash Brothers scene as it exists today. All profits will be donated to Child’s Play. Directed by Samox. 2013. Digital.

A FRAGILE TRUST tells the shocking story of Jayson Blair, the most infamous serial plagiarist of our time, and how he unleashed the massive scandal that rocked the New York Times and the entire world of journalism. In 2003 Blair was caught plagiarizing the work of other reporters and supplementing his own reporting with fabricated details in dozens of different stories published in the Times. The ensuing media frenzy left a major blemish on the history of the ‘Old Grey Lady’, which just a year earlier won a record 7 Pulitzer prizes for its coverage of 9/11. It was a spectacular fall for both Blair and the paper. The daily operations of the Times newsroom became a public spectacle as every major news outlet picked up the story and ran with it. The fact that Blair is African-American was emphasized again and again as accounts of the ‘Blair Affair’ served up sordid details in a soap-opera style tale of deception, drug abuse, racism, mental illness, hierarchy, white guilt, and power struggles inside the hallowed halls of the New York Times.

Through the course of the film, we follow Blair as he slowly unravels in the face of mounting pressures and distractions. Starting with his ‘reporting’ of the plagiarized article that ultimately lead to his undoing, we trace the rise and fall of this fascinating young reporter as he clings to his career at the Times even as he is losing his mind.

The Jayson Blair scandal is at the most basic level a compelling, character-driven narrative about an important chapter in the history of journalism. It is also a complex story about power, ethics, representation, race, and accountability in the mainstream media. Featuring exclusive interviews with everyone involved, including former Executive Editor Howell Raines and Blair himself, A FRAGILE TRUST is the first film to tell the whole sordid story of the scandal while exploring these deeper themes. With more and more publications moving to online-only formats and plagiarism on the rise, this cautionary tale about the slippery slope of ethical transgressions is more relevant than ever.